Let Me Honor A Black Man who Broke the Social injustice barrier in America.His crusade was not only for Blacks but,for the entire human race.There was once a saying in the old days that; IF You Are White You Are Alright,If You are Black You Stay Back and If You are Brown You Stick Around.
On the 40th annivessary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, few truths ring louder than this: Barack Obama and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. express in part the fallen leader’s split mind on race, a division marked by chronology and color.
Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright, his belief in white America’s ability to change by moral suasion resilient and durable. That is the leader we have come to know during annual King commemorations. After 1965, King was darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion.
King’s skepticism and anger were often muted when he spoke to white America, but they routinely resonated in black sanctuaries and meeting halls across the land. Nothing highlights that split — or white America’s ignorance of it and the prophetic black church King inspired — more than recalling King’s post-1965 odyssey, as he grappled bravely with poverty, war and entrenched racism. That is the King who emerges as we recall the meaning of his death. After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those “legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve” Northern ghettos or to “penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation.” In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 “were at best surface changes” that were “limited mainly to the Negro middle class.” In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks “are now making demands that will cost the nation something. … You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then.”
King’s conclusion? “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” He didn’t say this in the mainstream but to his black colleagues.
Similarly, although King spoke famously against the Vietnam War before a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, exactly a year before he died, he reserved some of his strongest antiwar language for his sermons before black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, two months before his death, King raged against America’s “bitter, colossal contest for supremacy.” He argued that God “didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world today,” preaching that “we are criminals in that war” and that we “have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world.” King insisted that God “has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, ‘Don’t play with me, Israel. Don’t play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I’m God. And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.’ ”
Perhaps nothing might surprise — or shock — white Americans more than to discover that King said in 1967: “I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” In a sermon to his congregation in 1968, King openly questioned whether blacks should celebrate the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. “You know why?” King asked. “Because it [the Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.”
In the same year, King bitterly suggested that black folk couldn’t trust America, comparing blacks to the Japanese who had been interred in concentration camps during World War II. “And you know what, a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the ’40s … will put black people in a concentration camp. And I’m not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now.” Earlier, King had written that America “was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.”
Such quotes may lead some to wrongly see King as anti-white and anti-American, a minister who allowed politics to trump religion in his pulpit, just as some see Wright now. Or they might say that King 40 years ago had better reason for bitterness than Wright in the enlightened 21st century. But that would put a fine point on arguable gains, and it would reveal a deep unfamiliarity with the history of the black Christian church.
The black prophetic church was born because of the racist politics of the white church. Only when the white church rejected its own theology of love and embraced white supremacy did black folk leave to praise God in their own sanctuaries, on their own terms. Insurgent slave ministers such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner hatched revolts against slave masters. Harriet Tubman was inspired by black religious belief to lead hundreds of black souls out of slavery. For many blacks, religion and social rebellion went hand in hand. They still do.
For most of our history, the black pulpit has been the freest place for black people. It is in the black church that blacks gathered to enhance social networks, gain education, wage social struggle — and express the grief and glory of black existence. The preacher was one of the few black figures not captive to white interests or bound by white money. Because black folk paid his salary, he was free to speak his mind and that of his congregation. The preacher often said things that most black folk believed but were afraid to say. He used his eloquence and erudition to defend the vulnerable and assail the powerful.
King extended that prophetic tradition, which includes vigorous self-criticism as well — especially sharp words against the otherworldliness that grips some churches. In 1967, King said that too many black churches were “so absorbed in a future good ‘over yonder’ that they condition their members to adjust to the present evils ‘over here.’ ” Two months before his death, King chided black preachers for standing “in the midst of the poverty of our own members” and mouthing “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” King struck fiercely at the ugly, self-serving practices of some black ministers when he claimed that they were “more concerned about the size of the wheelbase on our automobiles, and the amount of money we get in our anniversaries, than … about the problems of the people who made it possible for us to get these things.”
Obama has seized on the early King to remind Americans about what we can achieve when we allow our imaginations to soar high as we dream big. Wright has taken after the later King, who uttered prophetic truths that are easily caricatured when snatched from their religious and racial context. What united King in his early and later periods is the incurable love that fueled his hopefulness and rage. As King’s example proves, as we dream, we must remember the poor and vulnerable who live a nightmare. And as we strike out in prophetic anger against injustice, love must cushion even our hardest blows.
King’s shocking murder attracts this kind of silliness is no great surprise. In the two-score years since his death, he has become, in the mold of other great Americans like George Washington or Mark Twain, a figure more legend than human, his story so simplified and sugarcoated for easy digestion by schoolchildren that even adults who lived through the troubled 1960s have a tough time separating their memories of the man from the myth.
We don’t need to canonize King to appreciate his many accomplishments, nor declare time-wasting moratoriums to mourn his passing. He was a complex man with messy personal affairs who unified people of all races on the issue of civil rights, while dividing many with his controversial stance on the Vietnam War — he claimed in one major speech that the U.S. government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” a comment as controversial then as the “God damn America” sermon from presidential candidate Barack Obama’s pastor.
In the final years of his short life, King became nearly as concerned about the war and the plight of the poor as he was about racial discrimination. His murder silenced one of the most powerful voices on these topics that this country has ever known, and we’re still paying the price; if King were alive today (he would have turned 79 on Jan. 15), the fight against poverty would probably be higher on the national political agenda and the opposition to the Iraq war more focused. It is poignant to imagine how King, who squarely understood Vietnam as a failure of American conscience, would regard the current conflict — a moral, military and diplomatic misadventure now in its sixth year, with more than 4,000 American dead and untold damage to this nation’s place in the world.
Congress in 1983 made the anniversary of King’s birth, not his death, a national holiday. Its celebration remained controversial until 2000, when South Carolina, the last state to officially recognize it as a paid holiday for government employees, finally gave in. There will be no holidays today, but it’s still worthwhile to pause for a moment to remember that terrible day in 1968 when King was gunned down on a hotel balcony in Memphis. We didn’t lose a superhero who single-handedly ended discrimination in America, as legend would have it; we did lose a man who, warts and all, pricked the conscience of the nation and made it a better one.
Alam niyo ba ang paboritong awit ni Martin Luther King? Ang awit na “Black is Black”, kung natatandaan niyo pa iyan. “Black is black…I want my baby back…It’s gray it’s gray…since she went away…”. Iyan ang dapat maging slogan at campaign theme song ni Obama.
Read many things about MLK and there’s this interesting item that caught my eyes today in the light of present political exercise in the US. It is from the words of King’s biographer David Garrow and I quote:
In the months before his death, the 39-year-old King was speaking out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and was working with other civil rights leaders on a Poor People’s Campaign, with a march on Washington scheduled for that May. He was in Memphis that spring day to support striking sanitation workers.
But listeners of today might be surprised to hear echoes of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor, Garrow said. Just read King’s words from the famous “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, delivered from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta just two months before his death.
“God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war,” King said of the fighting in Vietnam. “And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it.”
While King didn’t go as far as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in suggesting that God “damn America,” he predicted that the Lord might indeed punish this country for “our pride and our arrogance.”
And though he spoke out on political issues, many who knew King feel sure the disciple of Mahatma Gandhi would not have sought political office. In 1967, King was being courted by the “New Left” to make a third-party run for president. King gave serious thought to a run, but ultimately decided his role lay outside the political arena.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and marched alongside him, doesn’t think time would have changed his friend’s mind.
“I think Martin was a preacher, and I doubt very much if he would have wanted to subject himself to the need to compromise and play certain games that are requisite to political candidacy,” Lowery said.
Had MLK he chosen to run for public office, however, his enemies — such as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — would likely have exposed potentially embarrassing details of King’s personal life, particularly extramarital affairs that came to light through FBI wiretaps of King’s home and offices in a campaign to uncover communists. No proof that King was a communist ever emerged, but the wiretaps did provide evidence of King’s infidelity.
Hoover’s office was unable to cow King into silence with threats of exposure of the affairs. But some wonder how King might have fared in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, when every flaw is laid bare and every word scrutinized.
Joeseg;
Wala akong alam tungkol kay Martin Luther.Hindi ko kayang sabayan ang inglisan ninyo ni Manong Cocoy.Magbasa na lang ako.Mahirap makisabay sa tulad ninyong dalawa na parehong henyo,baka gawin lang ninyo akong pamulutan.
Kutsara
Ay naku, hindi ko English ang mga isinulat ko dyan. Sinabi ko sa itaas, comment no. 6, na those are not my words as it came from MLK’s biographer David Garrow. Kung baga, nabasa ko lang kanina and I quoted it here.
Government Cover-ups: Martin Luther King Jr.
From the World Affairs Brief:
Martin Luther King was another public figure that was assassinated for the martyr effect. As the evidence below shows, the evidence of King’s corruption, womanizing and Communist sympathies, we was becoming more a liability to the Civil Rights agenda than an asset. It was only a matter of time before King’s reputation would self-destruct. By engineering his death and blaming it on a supposed racist, the Powers That Be could turn MLK into a hero. With the assistance of controlled judges, they could have his records sealed and make sure the public would not have access to the real Martin Luther King.
MARTIN LUTHER KING–THE MAN BEHIND THE MEDIA MASK
Every year America endures the same propaganda media-blitz on Martin Luther King day–the false portrayal of the “Reverend” King as an American hero; a saintly, self-sacrificing religious martyr for the cause of civil rights. He was everything but that and certainly no hero that any American should look up to. I have written extensively about the defense of true civil rights, no one can accuse me of hating the cause. I say this be way of introduction in anticipation of the fury my remarks will generate among the media attempting to perpetrate this growing myth upon American culture. Everything about Martin Luther King is a fraud. Here are the real facts.
1) NAME CHANGE: MLK is really Michael King, Jr. His father was a minister and arbitrarily decided to rename himself and his son, Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr.
2) PLAGIARISM IN HIS DOCTORAL THESIS: The most complete analysis of King’s chronic plagiarism in his academic career was done by Gerry Harbison, professor of Chemistry at University of Nebraska: “In 1988, the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project made a discovery that shocked it to its core. The Project, a group of academics and students, had been entrusted by Coretta Scott King with the task of editing King’s papers for publication. As they examined King’s student essays and his dissertation, they gradually became aware that King was guilty of massive plagiarism – that is, he had copied the words of other authors word-for-word, without making it clear that what he was writing was not his own. The Project spent years uncovering the full extent of King’s plagiarism. In November 1990, word leaked to the press, and they had to go public. The revelations caused a minor scandal and then were promptly forgotten.” Suppressed would be a more accurate description. The National Endowment for the Humanities actively suppressed the story in preparation for celebrating King. Its then director was Lynne Cheney, wife of the current Vice President. For the full story see Prof. Harbison’s website: http://chem-gharbison.unl.edu/mlk/plagiarism.html
3) COMMUNIST BACKGROUND AND CONTACTS: It appears that King established an early liaison with the American Communist Party and sought to create civil unrest in support of the revolution. His own biographer, David J. Garrow admitted that king once privately “described himself as a Marxist.” King constantly surrounded himself with Communists, hired them, and even went to great lengths to keep them on through secret relationships. King’s personal secretary in the 1950s was communist and homosexual Bayard Rustin. According to Sen. Jesse Helms, “King was repeatedly warned about his associations with known Communists by friendly elements in the Kennedy Administration and the Department of Justice [DOJ] (including strong and explicit warning from President Kennedy himself). King took perfunctory and deceptive measures to separate himself from the Communists [Stanley David Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell ] against whom he was warned. He continued to have close and secret contacts with at least some of them after being informed and warned of their background, and he violated a commitment to sever his relationships with identified Communists.”
4) IMMORAL AND ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR: Dr. King had an ample reputation as a philanderer and abuser of women of ill repute. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had run surveillance on King and his entourage for years attempting to gather data on his Communist connections. While the Bureau did surveill King’s attendance at Communist meetings, but most of the surveillance records show an extreme preoccupation after hours with illicit sex. In deference to King’s usefulness in promoting a national holiday for civil rights, US Federal judge John Lewis Smith, Jr. ordered all the FBI records sealed up in the National Archives for 50 years (till 2027). When I was Executive Editor of Conservative Digest, I called retired Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray and asked him what was in the evidence locked away. His answer surprised me. He said there were approximately 15 file cabinets of evidence on King–14 of them were full of recordings and transcripts of his illicit relationships with prostitutes. Only one file cabinet contained evidence of his Communist relationships.
Even former co-workers have blown the whistle on King’s scurrilous conduct. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in his book, And the Wall Came Tumbling Down, King spent his last night in the motel having an immoral liason with three women and then beat one of the woman in the morning before he was shot. Assistant Director of the FBI Charles D. Brennan wrote a letter to Sen. John P. East (R-NC) in which he stated that King’s conduct consisted of “orgiastic and adulterous escapades, some of which indicated that King could be bestial in his sexual abuse of women.” The FBI surveillance records covering his first night in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was to receive the Noble Peace Prize, document that his only interest was how to secure prostitutes for he and his entourage. An orgy followed. King’s surveillance and wiretaps were personally authorized by then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. If these allegations are true, this man should never have been put forward as a national hero. Yes, I am aware that other national heroes have had there weaknesses, but King’s conduct borders on a Clinton-like sexual addiction.
Here is a synopsis of the problems with the official version of events:
Source: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
On April 4th, 1968,… Martin Luther King was in Memphis Tennessee, trying to pick up the pieces of a peace march that on March 28th had been disrupted by a gang of agents provocateur called “The Invaders,” later revealed to be connected with COINTELPRO.
When Martin Luther King announced his return to Memphis, the FBI, with direct approval of J. Edgar Hoover, circulated to friendly press contacts a memo riducling Martin Luther King for staying at the white-owned Holiday Inn instead of the Motel Lorraine, which was black-owned. King fell for the ruse and booked himself into a ground floor room at the motel. An unknown individual, claiming to be King’s advance man, changed the booking to the second floor room with the balcony, claiming that King liked to look at swimming pools.
This new room, in the rear of the building and facing open alleys, was a security disaster, wide open to sniper fire from numerous angles.
At 6PM, while standing on the balcony and speaking to his driver, Martin Luther King was shot and killed.
Conveniently placed individuals immediately pointed to the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer’s boarding house. Those individuals who claimed that the shot had been fired from a hedge next to the building were ignored and ridiculed. James Earl Ray was arrested, urged to confess by his lawyer, then retracted his confession. He is still in jail, at present dying of liver desease (but probably not fast enough to suit the FBI).
1. James Earl Ray, not unlike his lone-nut cousin Lee Harvey Oswald, was a poor shot in the Army.
2. At Ray’s evidentiary hearing, a former FBI ballistics expert testified that not even the most skilled gunman could have accurately fired a rifle in the manner claimed by the government prosecution. According to the expert, to effectively line up the rifle for such a shot, the butt of the rifle would have had to stick six inches into the wall. The prosecution countered that Ray had contorted himself into position around the bathtub in order to make the kill shot, which seems equally incredulous.
3. After the assassination, Wayne Chastain, a reporter at the Memphis Press Scimitar, came across an unpublished Associated Press photograph in the newspaper’s files which was taken from the boarding house bathroom window, through which Ray allegedly shot King. The sniper’s view was obscured by branches from trees growing between the boarding house and the Motel Lorraine. The City of Memphis ordered the sanitation department to cut those trees down shortly after the assassination, making it impossible to conclusively determine how the tree branches may have interfered in a shot fired from the boarding house bathroom. (Students of one of the other assassinations from that period, that of President John F. Kennedy, will recall how the government of Dallas almost immediately replaced and relocated all the street signs in Dealey Plaza, some of which were reported to have had bullet holes).
4. Only one witness claimed to have seen Ray leaving the boarding house bathroom, a man named Charles Stephens. According to two other sources, Stephens was extremely inebriated at the time. The first three descriptions Stephens gave didn’t resemble Ray at all–in fact, Stephens’ first two descriptions of the alleged assassin were of a black man. Stephens admitted that he did not get a good look at the alleged assassin. It wasn’t until the FBI paid $30,000 in bar tabs for Stephens that he fingered Ray as the hit man. Charles Stephens, it should be noted, did not see the actual shooting. According to another witness, Stephens was busy urinating in some bushes when the killing actually occured.
5. Two other witnesses saw someone leaving the boarding house bathroom. One witness, Bessie Brewer, the owner of the boarding house, could not identify the individual and refused to identify Ray as the man she had rented a room to. The other witness, Stephens’ common law wife Grace, said she did get a good look at him, and that it was definitely not James Earl Ray. Grace’s drunken husband became the preferred witness. Grace was committed to a mental institution. According to her lawyer, C.M. Murphy, she was committed illegally, and after she was committed, the Memphis prosecutors removed her records from the hospital. After years of imprisonment under heavy sedation, Grace still refused to recant her story.
6. In addition to Brewer, two other witnesses at the boarding house insisted that the man who rented Ray’s room looked nothing like James Earl Ray.
7. Less than two minutes after the fatal shot was fired, a bundle containing the 30.06 Remington rifle allegedly used in the assassination and some of Ray’s belongings was conveniently found in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company next door to the boarding house. Ray would have had to fire the shot that killed King from his contorted position in the bathroom, exit the sniper’s nest, go to his room to collect his belongings and wrap and tie it all in a bundle, leave his room, run down the stairs and out of the boarding house, stash the bundle next door, and then get away from the scene unnoticed–all within two minutes! (Again, students of the JFK assassination will recognize a familier pattern in the superhuman running skills attributed to the patsy).
8. A service station manager told an investigator for Ray’s defense team that he saw Ray several blocks from the boarding house at the time of the shooting. He was stabbed soon after he started talking to the defense team. After changing his story about his involvement in the assassination, Ray himself was stabbed while in the library of the Brushy Mountain Prison.
9. Martin Luther King’s brother, an excellent swimmer, was found drowned in his pool following Martin Luther King’s assassination.
10. Finally and most telling, the FBI lab was never able to ballistically match the bullet recovered from the body of Martin Luther King with the James Earl Ray rifle conventiantly found in the doorway.
THE JAMES EARL RAY RIFLE
The only basis for James Earl Ray’s imprisonment is his confession, one offered under coercion by his court-appointed attorney and immediately retracted. There exists no evidence at all that James Earl Ray was the killer of Martin Luther King.
James Earl Ray is now trying to avail himself of a Tennessee law which allows the re-opening of his case in the face of new investigative technologies that might exhonorate him.
Even worse, when the evidence of wrongdoing is really hot, colluding judges will seal the evidence for 50+ years in official archives to make sure that by the time the public finds out about it, all the guilty parties will be out of office or dead. This is precisely why the FBI files on Martin Luther King were sealed prior to the debate on whether King would be worthy to honor in a national holiday. According to a former Asst. Director of the FBI, who had first-hand knowledge of the facts, 14 of the 15 file cabinets full of the sealed surveillance files document Reverend King’s chronic pornography and prostitution habits, including his raunchy activities while in Norway accepting his Nobel Prize. The other file cabinet full of evidence traces his connections to the far left and the Communist Party. Had the public known of this information, King would have been disgraced rather than honored. What we need is a piece of legislation making it a crime to classify as secret any evidence of a crime committed by government officers or agent. But then again, as long as only government insiders are allowed to view and judge the contents of classified material, the public will never know the truth–except through a leak by some patriotic government employee–which is exactly what this kind of legislation is trying to preclude.
Kutsara;
Nabasa ko rin iyan at ipinosti ko dito.America is celebrating MLK day kaya naisipan kong gawin topic to honor him.
By the way,nanalo ang essay entry ng anak ko last year sa pa contis ng school regarding Martin Luther at nakatangap siya ng savings bond certificate in price.
Ganyan ba ang istorya ng buhay niya?Wala ring nagbago sa mga salita ni MLK at ang itim lang naman ang naniwala sa kany.
Ganyan ba ang istorya ng buhay niya?Wala ring nagbago sa mga salita ni MLK at ang itim lang naman ang naniwala sa kanya.
Di ba si Obama may dugong puti at itim? Si Presidente Putim ng Russia daw ganoon din. Putim (Puti at Itim).